


Cosmogonies

by lostlenore



Category: Tokyo Babylon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Alternate Universe - Mythology, M/M, Yuletide 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-15 11:58:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13030617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostlenore/pseuds/lostlenore
Summary: Six ume plums. An abduction. A resurrection. Three truths and no lies.





	Cosmogonies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jougetsu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jougetsu/gifts).



> For Jougetsu, who wanted alive!Hokuto. May your Yuletide be merry and gay! This fic is loosely based on Akutagawa's short story _In a Grove_ (which went on to become _Rashomon_ ) and the story of Hades and Persephone.

0\. Prologue

All stories are true in Tokyo. 

Every fairytale, every ghost story, every flickering shape in the corner of your eye. If it happened, it is true. If you felt it, in your teeth, in your hair, in the marrow of your bones, it is true. If the story is a feeling searching for the shape of words to give it life, it is true.

And if the story changes it’s shape, if it bends like a river, it is only because each person’s truth is different, and there are so very many people in Tokyo.

 

* * *

 

1\. Subaru 

He meets the man by the river. This sounds vague, but in death there is only one river, and, in Subaru’s eyes, only ever one man. 

The man is tall, and broad, with big hands and a quiet air. The lanterns floating along the river make it difficult to see his eyes, but there is no gold in his mouth. He is no passenger, seeking the comfort of shadows of the afterlife, and Subaru is relieved to stop playing the ferryman. 

Relieved, and curious. 

The man stands on the banks of death and flowers bloom with each step he takes, small starburst of red spider lillies, pale columns of while callas. They spread like stepping stones across the ash of the river bank, until the man is right in front of him, smiling with a flash of teeth like the shine of a knife.

He takes Subaru's hand. Subaru allows it. There is a magic clinging to him, old and powerful, twined with the provinces of death itself like a vine spilling over from one fence to the next. 

"For you,” says the man, and tucks a small, pink flower behind Subaru's ear. Subaru catches a whiff of blood, of earth. "No one else could wear its beauty so well." 

Subaru smiles at him, surprised and pleased with it. 

"-and no one else will," says the man, his hand tracing the curve of Subaru’s cheek. Subaru can see his eyes now: one flat, black, and hungry, while the other swirls a pale, milky white. 

Not a man at all, then, but Sakurazuka—the gnashing teeth of Spring. 

The flower tucked behind Subaru’s ear burst forth with roots, binding him, trapping him before he can even open his mouth to scream, and they are shuddering upward towards the surface, exploding into light. 

When the punishing brightness of the sun dims, Subaru opens his eyes and finds that the roots of the flower so lovingly tucked behind his ear have grown large and sprawling. They fork and slither into the damp green earth, and push up towards the sky in a tangle of branches. A tree, Subaru realizes. And a prison, too. 

The Sakurazuka watches him, a ghost of a smile on his lips. He stops by the tree to bring Subaru flowers daily, days slipping away in a haze of delicate pink blossoms that find their way into Subaru’s clothes, his hair, his mouth.

”You can’t keep me here forever,” Subaru says, when he wakes one morning with cherry blossoms on his lips. He doesn’t think it’s his imagination that they grow hungrier, more possessive of him. 

“Not forever, no,” the Sakurazuka says with the benevolent smile Subaru can’t seem to shake from him. “Your sister would hardly forgive me for being so selfish.”

Hokuto would drop him to the darkest crack in time and space, if she were here. She is not here. And like the cherry blossoms, Subaru only gets hungrier, more reckless with each passing day. 

He loses track of time, trapped within the tree. He is ravenous, though he could not name the things he hungers for most: the stream of spirits slipping peacefully into a welcoming night, the comforting press of shadows around him, or the way the Sakurazuka kisses petals into his mouth—one, two, three, four, five, six.

 

* * *

 

2\. Seishiro

He meets the man in the park. 

Ueno is heaving with tourists in April, every last inch of the grass covered by picnic blankets and tarps and people flocking from the far corners of the world to witness the slow unfurling of cherry blossoms in spring. The tiresome grey of winter has receded at last, and the millions of Tokyo come to Seishiro's alter to offer him their hopes and joys and fears for the year ahead in exchange for a blessing of small pink petals. 

As offerings go, Seishiro's had worse.  

The man seeks Seishiro out, the dark sweep of his lashes like a stroke of an ink brush against paper as he looks up and shyly asks about the graves.

"Graves?" Seishiro licks his ice cream and lets his sunglasses hide the interest in his face

“Graves. They called to me,” the man says, hushed, as if they’re standing at a wake instead of the sunny sprawl of Tokyo. “Their spirits are trapped—they are locked between life and death, betwixt and between. They cannot find peace.”

 Seishiro eyes the man with interest, taking in the wide black hat and the short, blood-red jacket. If he looks with the Sight of his right eye the lines of the man’s frame waver, flickering between the jacket and long robes of purest white, crawling with seals to lock and bury.

Seishiro has never understood those who think of death as a kindness. The man before him looks kind, though, with his hesitant smile and his wide, dark eyes. And he is most certainly death. 

Seishiro lets him pull skeletons from the roots of the biggest cherry tree in Ueno Park under a curtain of bright pink petals. There are many, and they claw upwards through the dirt and into the man’s embrace. Seishiro knows he should turn his face away, a final privacy in their passing, but he watches the churn of bone and earth with barely concealed interest. 

When they finish, the sun has sunk low, and the man is just as beautiful covered in dirt and petals and ash as he was under the perfect blue of the April sky. 

“I don’t know how I can repay you for this,” Seishiro says, lying fluently. He has many ideas, and a number of them end up with the man pressed against this very cherry tree, calling Seishiro’s name. 

Small steps, at least to start.

“Surely you must be hungry,” Seishiro says. He opens his palm and out spills a a perfect ume plum, the distillation of every bright spring morning.

”I couldn’t,” Subaru says.

“Please,” Seishiro says, and cuts the fruit neatly in two with a tap of his fingers. A thin, sticky juice drips between his knuckles, spilling onto the carpet of flowers below. “I insist.” 

He brings the fruit to the man’s lips, the soft heat of his mouth pressed to the meat of Seishiro’s thumb, and watches as the man swallows and takes him in—fingers, fruit, and all.

“Are you hungry?” Seishiro says again the next morning, fingers trailing over the curve of the man’s lips. The man looks just as right in the floral riot of Seishiro’s sleek Roppongi apartment as he did pinned to the cherry tree last night, pink and gasping.

“I should be getting home,” says the man. He makes no movement to leave Seishiro’s bed, and Seishiro rewards him for this with a kiss so slow and heated he’s surprised they don’t burn the building down. 

The man stays. He stays and stays, and at the end of the week there are a tidy line of plum pits arranged on the window sill: one, two, three, four, five, six.  

 

* * *

 

3\. Hokuto

Hokuto wakes up to find Subaru gone. One moment he is there on the banks of the river, ushering souls across the threshold of death, and then there is a blankness, a void that pricks at Hokuto’s mind, a loss that demands to be felt. 

”Someone has taken my brother,” Hokuto tells the mass of spirits swirling in the river. She is calm, though there is anger running hot underneath. How dare they. Subaru is hers, and she is his, and how _dare_ someone try to rip him away. How dare they succeed. 

“We are two halves of the same spirit; what is done to him is as good as done to me,” she says, and it is as much threat as promise. “I will not rest until he is returned to my side.”

The spirits hum in agreement, a sound like a long sigh of wind. To cheat death, to steal from her, is a craven thing—especially to those who she has already claimed. 

“Come,” Hokuto says, closing her eyes and reaching through the dark to find the small pinprick of light that is Subaru, her twinned soul. “He is trapped among the living.”

Hokuto falls back into herself, away from the sun and it’s piercing brightness. She opens her eyes to soothing shadows, and the soft glow of souls swirling and humming at her feet like tide-pools of stars. She smiles.

“Close the black gates. Death is not at home today.”

So Death commands it, so it is done. The gates to the afterlife shut with echo like the low, lonely chime of a bell.

The flow of spirits through the river swell and push back toward the surface in one great wave, a riptide of ghosts pouring back into life. The dead find, to their delight, that they no longer remain dead. The living find, to their horror, the very same.

Hokuto can feel all of them, their souls tied to her with a thin red string, an inevitability of their fate. She watches through their eyes and feels through their hands as they wash through the world in a sickly chill, whispering in her ear: _not here. Not him. Not yet_. 

She expands her senses, alight with awareness outside of herself, outside of shadow and into light. It is intoxicating, or excruciating, or maybe they are the same two faces of the same emotion. Hokuto imagines, horribly, that this is what living on earth feels like all the time. It’s too ghastly to contemplate for long, though she can see the quiet seduction of it for Subaru, who is at his core a masochist. 

Then: the threads pull at her, the same direction all at once. _He is found_ , whisper the spirits as legion. _He is found—in Tokyo._

Spring has come to Tokyo, blooming out of the skeleton of winter, when Hokuto sets foot in Ueno Park. The trees weep with an abundance of falling pink petals that cling to the flowing black lace of Hokuto’s gown, and fall across her heavy veil, blotting out the clear blue sky.

She sees the man smoking in the shade of the tree—thick with age and death and magic, draped in sacred rope and _shide_ paper, there is only one tree that matters in this park—and sighs. 

The Sakurazuka. She should have known. Hokuto thinks of death as a peace, a final rest for weary souls. The Sakurazuka are the teeth of spring, ripping away the the quiet of winter and splintering it into sunlight, bloody and raw. They are the enemy. They have Subaru. 

“I wondered when you’d be by,” the man says, when he spots her. The sun winks merrily off his glasses. He offers Hokuto a cigarette, solicitous. Hokuto declines. 

“Where is he?” She says it softly, but it is not a soft question. Around her, drifting spirits gather and settle into the trees like birds coming home to roost. If this is a fight it will be short and bloody. 

“Sleeping.” The man gestures carelessly to a figure nestled between them in the roots of the cherry tree where Subaru is indeed asleep. Half-covered in petals, and with marks of red blooming across his the pale skin of his throat, Hokuto had not recognized him. There is something in him altered, though Hokuto could not say what, that moves the two of them out of allignment. No longer are they perfect mirror copies. 

When Hokuto grabs the Sakurazuka by the throat, he smiles. 

“You can feel it can’t you? He’s changed.”

”No,” Hokuto says. “We don’t change. You have changed him.” She tightens her grip on his throat, thinking of the red marks on Subaru’s skin, wondering in fleeting thought if they were made with hands or mouths, or if it makes any difference at all. 

The man laughs, a raggedy-sounding cough. “Did you know that there is only ever one Sakurazuka?”

Hokuto stills. 

“It’s alright,” he says with a killing kindness. “Not many do. I always wondered how two gods could rule in the same domain. Sakurazuka are not quite gods, and not quite men.”

”if you think taking him from me is _doing me a favor,_ ” Hokuto says, and oh, there’s the anger. Sharp and cold, it fills her her up until she’s shaking from the effort of not letting it spill and cover the entire world. 

“No,” he says. “Only that he has eaten food of this world, and we are the same: betwix and between. Neither fully god, or fully human.”

”We are nothing like you,” Hokuto spits, with such anger that it breaks another wave of cherry petals from the tree above. 

“Do you know how the Sakurazuka become Sakurazuka?”   He whispers. His eyes are on her now, no longer teasing but watching, waiting.

”Hokuto?” Subaru’s voice floats up from the roots of the tree. She lets go of the Sakurazuka, watches him crumple to the floor, coughing, and kneels next to Subaru. 

“I heard your voice and I thought I was dreaming.” He smiles at her, still not fully awake. His left eye is a pure, milky white. “I was so hungry.”

 _How do the Sakurazuka become Sakurazuka?_ Hokuto knows, without being told.

Behind Subaru, the Sakurazuka looks at her and smiles, the marks of her fingers bright on his throat: one, two, three, four, five. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cosmogonies by lostlenore [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13539642) by [Rhea314 (Rhea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Rhea314)




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